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Patch for Brazil Summer Time 2000.
by Marcus Felipe Pereira Oct. 3, 2000

Oct. 3, 2000

Hi Arthur, Brazil's government changed the rules for the Daylight Summer Time - AGAIN! They changed the start date of it from "Fist Sunday of October" to "Second Sunday or October". So in 2000 the BRST will start on 8th of October an not in 1st of October. I'm sending a patch for the original "southamerica" timezone file from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2000f.tar.gz Marcus Felipe Pereira marcus(a)task.com.br

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Re: Alternative place names?
by Paul Eggert Oct. 3, 2000

Oct. 3, 2000

Oscar van Vlijmen <o.van.vlijmen(a)tip.nl> writes: > I am NOT proposing to change the Theory rules, but I wonder: population > count, popularity, media exposure all change, a capital hardly or not. Actually, capitals change suprisingly often. E.g. Kazakhstan changed its capital in 1997, and then changed the capital's name in 1998. (Good thing they didn't use new time zone rules too, or we'd have had to track that mess.) Even China, the most populous country in the world, changed its capital twice in the last century (in 1928 and again in 1949) and there was a period in which the location of its capital was in serious dispute. Capitals are political creatures, and we are trying to avoid politics here as much as possible, so I don't want to give the "capitalness" of a city much weight. > Chung is a British transliteration (Wade, 1867), indeed: tch'ong is the > French EFEO (1902) transliteration, but k'ing is the French transliteration > for pinyin qing, whereas ch'ing would be the British transliteration. The name "Chungking" is not a systematic transliteration; it is merely traditional. It's probably the weakest of the existing Chinese names, i.e. the one where there is the strongest reason to change, as I get the feeling that the Pinyin transliteration "Chongqing" is gaining wide popularity in ordinary English usage. Google reports 38k English-language hits for "Chongqing" and 21k for "Chungking", so if we were choosing now "Chongqing" might well be the winner. But I'm not sure that this is enough to change an established name. Oscar van Vlijmen <o.van.vlijmen(a)tip.nl> writes: Paul Hill writes: > Someone said there is the rule: every country gets at least one entry. > Is this implemented in practice? Every country including all small > countries that share zones (like the Caribbean)? Yes. In hindsight this rule was probably unwise, as countries are also political creatures. Not sure I want to change it now, though.

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Re: week starts at Sunday or Monday??
by Janis.Papanagnou＠varetis.de Oct. 3, 2000

Oct. 3, 2000

>so my question is.... >now that I decided that days are niumbere 1 to 7, >what is day 1 ??? >is it Sunday, or Monday? >what is the Right Thing to do? Your choice is ok. One observation to add is about numbering/enumerating/counting in general: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... well - I've never heard about "the 0-st". Enumerating starting with zero seems to have come in vogue with C, due to the simpler address calculation (saves some micro seconds?). Whether week starts with Monday or Sunday depends on the culture; this is independent of any number assigned to it. Regards, Janis

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Paraguay change
by Steffen Thorsen Oct. 2, 2000

Oct. 2, 2000

I have three independent reports that Paraguay (America/Asuncion) changed to DST this Sunday (1 Oct), so the "Para"-rules must be updated. Also, Brazil needs to be updated, like already reported by several people on this list. Best regards, Steffen -- Steffen Thorsen <steffen(a)thorsen.priv.no> <steffent(a)pvv.ntnu.no> http://www.thorsen.priv.no

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Re: week starts at Sunday or Monday??
by Dik.Winter＠cwi.nl Oct. 2, 2000

Oct. 2, 2000

> > 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... well - I've never heard about "the 0-st". > > Enumerating starting with zero seems to have come in vogue with C, > There's been a Zero Church Street in Cambridge, Mass., for a good deal > longer than there's been a C programming language. Blame the > mathematicians. The Indian calendars use a large number of counting years. Some of those start with 0, others with 1. This even predates Cambridge, Mass.. dik

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Re: week starts at Sunday or Monday??
by Peter Ilieve Oct. 2, 2000

Oct. 2, 2000

Christoph Bugel wrote: > > so my question is.... > now that I decided that days are niumbere 1 to 7, > what is day 1 ??? > is it Sunday, or Monday? > what is the Right Thing to do? The document by Gary Houston describing the ISO 8601:1988 date/time representations that is available at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/iso8601.ps.gz contains this paragraph: An ordinal date is identified by a given day in a given year. A week is identified by its number in a given year. A week begins with a Monday, and the first week of a year is the one which includes the first Thursday, or equivalently the one which includes January 4. Midnight may be expressed as either 00:00:00 or 24:00:00. Peter Ilieve peter(a)aldie.co.uk

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share/zoneinfo/southamerica (Brazil saving update)
by Mario Sergio Fujikawa Ferreira Oct. 1, 2000

Oct. 1, 2000

Hi, I was informed this was the right place to inform this. If you are not, I both apologize and ask if you can direct this to the right person. I would like to report that the Light Time Saving estimates for Brazil are incorrect. The new correct time savings for this year are - begin 08 Oct 2000 00:00:00 - end 18 Feb 2001 00:00:00 Unfortunaly, it is not clear if the 2nd weekend of September will be the official beginning for consequent years. The same applies for the end date. Therefore, I would advise maintaining the actual policy, yet adding this year's information. By the way, no states were removed or added in this latest decree. --- southamerica Fri Apr 7 01:20:30 2000 +++ /tmp/southamerica Sun Oct 1 02:02:25 2000 @@ -353,6 +353,10 @@ # and are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all. Rule Brazil 1999 max - Oct Sun>=1 0:00 1:00 S Rule Brazil 2000 max - Feb lastSun 0:00 0 - +# Decree <a href="http://pcdsh01.on.br/DEC3592.htm">3,592</a> (1999-10-01) +# adopted by the same states. +Rule Brazil 2000 only - Oct 6 0:00 1:00 S +Rule Brazil 2001 only - Feb 18 0:00 0 - # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] -- Mario S. F. Ferreira - UnB - Brazil - "I guess this is a signature." lioux at ( freebsd dot org | linf dot unb dot br ) flames to beloved devnull(a)someotherworldbeloworabove.org

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places: links
by Oscar van Vlijmen Oct. 1, 2000

Oct. 1, 2000

A couple of links for those who are still interested in places, in spite of past discussions ;) Jesper Nørgaard gave earlier: UN list of capital cities and cities of 100,000 inhabitants and more http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/demog/ctry.htm Another link, just found by me: Global Population Project, with many more statistics and info: http://www.koeln.netsurf.de/~stefan.helders/content.htm Interested in names? "The GEOnet Names Server (GNS) provides access to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency's (NIMA) database of foreign geographic feature names. Approximately 20,000 of the database's 3.5 million features are updated monthly with names information approved by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (US BGN)." The index to the country files: http://164.214.2.59/gns/html/Cntry_Files.html Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Latitude/longitude, sometimes a bit more info http://shiva.pub.getty.edu/tgn_browser/ US State Department: Independent States in the World; a list with capitals: http://www.state.gov/www/regions/independent_states.html I just read an article about Sealand (AD Magazine Sep 30 2000, from Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch), www.ad.nl) The Principality of Sealand, not by the UN recognised "country", not in tz: http://www.sealandgov.com/ Location: 051.53.40 N, 01.28.57 E. No information about timezone, probably UTC+0. Average number of inhabitants: 6. About 300 people seem to have a Sealand passport. Which Dutch city (that's 'city', not 'gemeente') is the largest? Amsterdam 718150 Rotterdam 590480 Den Haag 442800 Source (Dutch site): http://www.stedengids.net/cijfersnederland.htm UN statistics (see above) gives the same idea (year 1994): Amsterdam city: 723163, urban agglom.: 1100764 Rotterdam city: 598236, urban agglom.: 1076442 's-Gravenhage city: 444108, urban agglom.: 694733 Oscar van Vlijmen 2000-10-01

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IAU resolution supporting leap second reform
by Paul Eggert Sept. 30, 2000

Sept. 30, 2000

http://clockdev.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0009&L=leapsecs&F=lf&S=&… reports that the following resolution was adopted by the IAU last month: The International Astronomical Union Recognising 1. that the definition of Coordinated Universal time (UTC) relies on the astronomical observation of the UT1 time scale in order to introduce leap seconds, 2. that the unpredictability of leap seconds affects modern communication and navigation systems, 3. that astronomical observations provide an accurate estimate of the secular deceleration of the Earth's rate of rotation, Recommends 1. that the IAU establish a Working Group reporting to Division 1 at the General Assembly in 2003 to consider the redefinition of UTC, 2. that this study discuss whether there is a requirement for leap seconds, the possibility of inserting leap seconds at pre-determined intervals, and the tolerance limits for UT1-UTC, and 3. that this study be undertaken in cooperation with the appropriate groups of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-R), the International Bureau for Weights and Measures (BIPM), and relevant navigational agencies.

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Re: Alternative place names?
by Dik.Winter＠cwi.nl Sept. 29, 2000

Sept. 29, 2000

> I am NOT proposing to change the Theory rules, but I wonder: population > count, popularity, media exposure all change, a capital hardly or not. A > capital is or should be known to everybody. Haven't we all had some kind of > geography lessons, years or decades ago? Oh, come on. How many people in the Netherlands know the official name of its capital? How many people not of Dutch origin know what the real capital is? And it would seem strange to use that name in the files in conjunction with "Amsterdam time". I am quite happy with Europe/Amsterdam, but that is where I live of course ;-). dik

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